


Companions (+ Other Fallout Characters) React to the Death of Their and the Sole Survivor's Child

by tea_petty



Series: Collection of Companions' Reactions [27]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Child Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-17 23:27:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19964971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tea_petty/pseuds/tea_petty
Summary: Sole and their partner grapple with a gutting loss.





	Companions (+ Other Fallout Characters) React to the Death of Their and the Sole Survivor's Child

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to my Tumblr; tea-petty

A week had since passed. A week since, _she’d_ passed. A year since they’d become a family, but more since Sole and Travis had fallen absolutely in love with her. How many plans had they made since gathering the infant from her meager basket shelter on Diamond City’s doorstep, and adopting her into their family? 

School at the age of five? Mister Zwicky and Miss Elsa would’ve made fine teachers for Olivia. Maybe they would’ve gotten a dog once Liv was old enough to play. Sole had imagined countless days in the life of their cozy, little family. Three people who’d found each other and made each other home. 

In another life Sole kept tucked in a bubble wrapped corner of his mind, Travis bounced their daughter on his lap as she giggled, rich peals of laughter filling the Diamond City Radio trailer. 

In the empty and untouched room (at least for the past week) sat Shaun’s old crib which Sole had refurbished. He’d even managed to fix the mobile on it again – another thing Olivia delighted in, as they delighted in her. 

A little more than a week ago, they might have been doing just that; spinning her mobile or cozying up for the night. 

Night.

That was when the deathclaw had come. 

They had been staying up at the Costal Cottage, since business had taken them up north, and they couldn’t have stood to leave little Olive behind. 

Sole’s innards squeezed, like his ribs had clenched and were spearing into his intestines, teeth in a bear trap. They could’ve, they _should_ have. This grief was what was so unbearable.

They’d found the babysitter’s body first, her viscera smeared all over the property. It had been haunting. Sole could remember the fresh terror that had coursed through the pair of them, so identical it was like they had been feeling that one, singular thing together. It had bound them. Connected them, like strings on a puppet, and had urged them forward, scrambling into a frantic, fear strung search until they’d found Olivia’s body too. Or what had remained of it anyways.

Travis had collapsed; and Sole couldn’t blame him – he hadn’t been strong enough to catch his partner’s fall either, for he was too busy crumpling to his own knees, and dry heaving onto the blood-dampened wood floors.

“My _God_ –“ Travis croaked, his voice breaking off suddenly into a choked sputtering that was either sobs or dry heaves themselves.

Had it been a plea? For whatever was out there to have mercy on their baby girl? Had it been a curse - for allowing it to happen? Sole wondered at this occasionally in the week that had passed since, quietly and to himself. 

It had been the last thing Travis said to him.

A part of Sole wanted to go after him; his love, his life, his sun and moon and everything in between. But Olivia’s loss was…trying and then some. Sole would leave it at that, for the sake of his sanity.

Not a day went by he found himself toeing the fringe of _that_ train of thought, dancing narrowly to avoid _her_ face in his mind, and _his_ cracked voice, salt in the wound, pleading to a faceless god.

He hated the color red now. And Sole hated the Coastal Cottage – it wasn’t so much a cottage anyways, rather than a hunk of gnarled wood, weathered from radiation and the wind, and the home no one would build there. When he had kids one day, he’d never let them play there.

As a concerned father, he couldn’t let Ol- anyone – play there. It wasn’t safe. There were

_(monsters)_

dwelling in its depths, and the unsettled nature of the structure bode poorly for anyone who dared step foot in it.

Sole and Travis slept alone now.

The night following immediately after Olivia’s death (or rather, the first night Travis and Sole could stand to attempt sleep, after the incident) they had lain in bed, curled inwards, facing each other, nose to nose. Both of their eyes were wide, staring, as if trying to ward the nightmares off the other’s back.

Things had been as close to peaceful as they could be, and then Sole had spoken.

“You think Olive’s scared?” he whispered into the dark.

It attached itself to him like leeches.

Travis’ brow furrowed.

“What?”

He sounded so muted, his voice so hoarse, it was more like he mouthed the word.

“Liv,” Sole asked, a little more pressed, “do you think she’s scared? It’s awfully dark.”

His eyes were wide, almost bulging. Travis could see the blood vessels ridging at the surface.

Travis stared back for a while, comprehending but not understanding.

Then finally, he said; “How could you ask that?”

Sole stared back, aghast. It was easier than not being able to ask the question, he thought.

Travis turned around, and Sole faced his back for the rest of the night.

The gap that had broken open between them that night remained unbridged; a result of a lack of trying on both men’s parts. There was no room for anything else with the hulking, stifling grief that weighed on the both of them; all their energy and efforts were reserved for fighting to keep their heads above the sucking current of their daughter’s death. They had been treading water for a week now though, and while that may have seemed like very little time in the context of, a term of employment or a lifespan, it was a very, very long time for one to churn their weary limbs, and fight for a survival that felt little more than half-existing. Sole was exhausted to say the least.

Too tired to leave the dark, morose rooms of the small house he took up in at Diamond City, and too tired to care about the friends he left knocking futilely at his front door.

One week turned to a couple, and as the weeks blurred into months, eventually, they stopped knocking. Sole barely noticed.

One day though, there came a knock that wouldn’t falter, like a stubborn cough in a strange mid-summer sick spell.

Sole still didn’t answer the door – it made no difference to him after all.

But then the door opened anyways, without anyone going to fetch it, and whoever had entered, ran their warm, pitiful hands down the length of Sole’s side, tracing from shoulder to hip.

“Sole,”

Even in its current rusted state, he recognized it as the voice of his heart.

“Sole,” Travis said again, “you have to…it’s time to get up.”

Sole didn’t move, but his eyes misted and stung; it was the most he’d felt in a long while.

“Sole,” the voice came with a couple of gentle shakes to his shoulder, jostling the catatonic man and momentarily separating him from his grief. But then it clung to him again, most readily like Saranwrap; he wouldn’t get rid of it that easily.

“ _Dammit Sole!_ ”

The voice sounded angry now.

“I know you’re sad! I know you’re scared! I’m sad and scared too!”

The words rolled off Sole ineffectually, like water off duck feathers. Sole knew this. Travis had been the first to retreat, that had been all too clear. Something that could’ve been an answering anger, if it had not been so weak, stirred within Sole.

“We lost our _child_ ,”

Sole chest squeezed right then, and he finally answered; a small, sharp puff of air, like something had pricked him and the grief he’d been stuffing in hissed out like air from a punctured balloon.

“We need to heal together,” Travis continued, insistently.

The anger that had stirred in Sole had raised its sleepy head now, and he had half a mind to shove up and look his lover in the face.

“You’re the only one who knows what I’m going through,” he said in a small voice.

Sole’s throat closed up, and he resisted the urge to choke out something venomous. Travis was right, and to say it didn’t pain Sole would be incorrect. But in truth, everything pained him right now - that was the nature of such monstrous grief. 

Looking at his lover, hurt, taking air into his lungs, hurt, just existing, _hurt_. And knowing that Travis was grappling with the same suffocating sadness, one so massive that he couldn’t see past, or around it, one so heavy that it sat on his chest like an anvil and forced out each breath of air in a pained, heavy stream – that hurt too.

Sole clenched his jaw, and the tendon trembled from the force as hot, angry wetness slipped down his cheeks. It caught what little light intruded into the room and didn’t escape Travis’ notice. Tentatively, he raised his own shaky hand to Sole’s shoulder, smoothing over the tense muscle and trying to steady his quivering frame. 

Then, Sole _did_ make a strangled noise; and Travis ventured it would’ve been a wail had Sole the strength to make it so. He shook more violently, and Travis felt his own face heat as his eyes stung, and chest ached.

Travis’ other arm came to wrap around Sole, a gesture of comfort turning to one of need as he fell on the man, the frantic clutch keeping him from sliding to the floor. Sole’s arms reached around to grab Travis back, and then there was a tangle of limbs as both men collapsed onto each other. 

It was warm, and damp, a mess of sniffling and tears that mingled so that the actual source could not be discerned. Their fists balled around handfuls of the others’ clothes, seeking desperate holds on something that could anchor them through this storm. 

Sole squeezed as tightly as he could, hoping it would either hurt Travis, or hurt himself, and it seemed, Travis was operating under the same motives. Fingernails bit past the thin material of his shirt, and into his sides. His heart throbbed raggedly in his chest as it had for the past few months, just hurting and existing in that hurt, because there was nothing around to stifle it, or temper it in the gaping hollowness that resided inside him. 

Sole had thought that coupled with Travis’ own abhorrent emptiness, that the sheer magnitude of the vacuum their loss created would suck him up, but strangely enough, it wasn’t more empty that Travis brought, it was himself, and with him there, he banished at least a Travis-sized amount of hollowness. 

Sole felt a Travis-sized amount better.


End file.
